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  1. By lechacal on March 15, 2011 9:37 AM
    Japanese people rule. No looting at all. Standing patiently in line for supplies. Not blaming the government for its response. Dealing with the disaster the best they can.

    Um – ok neither did people in New Zealand or Haiti or Chile or China – I think most people including Americans do that -lets not bring up Katrina as that was an entirely different and complex situation

  2. DIBS, I am aware of hiragana and katagana. I started to study it back when I was in the Navy and got orders to go to Japan, right before they yanked my orders because they had given me the orders as sort of a punishment for turning down some other orders, but then they realized I was getting all pumped to go to Japan and they saw me drinking coffee studying Japanese at the McDonalds on base in all of my spare time, so they changed my orders to go to Maine, but that was cool with me too.

    Anyways, just because they have a parallel phonetic system doesn’t mean they don’t waste tons of brainpower on kanji and doesn’t mean there isn’t tons of stuff there in kanji.

  3. lech – The kid of friends of mine who was fluent in Japanese went to school there for his 8th grade year. Surprisingly, he was up to snuff on all but Japanese history but his math skills declined over the year because he wasn’t allowed to ask questions when he didn’t understand.

  4. quote:
    Japanese people rule. No looting at all.

    you do not know that. american media has the tendency to always show our worst during disasters (except for 9/11 for some reason). i do agree tho that in general, as a peoples, they seem more peaceful and dont act as bad as we do during an emergency. we did behave during the blackout of 2003, no? that’s a little bit of progress i guess

    *rob*

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